Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 - Before Midnight Read online

  That’s the trouble with working for and living with a really great detective.

  Chapter 2

  Since I got home late that night and there was nothing urgent on, it was after nine Wednesday morning before I got down to the kitchen for my snack of grapefruit, oatmeal, griddle cakes, bacon, blackberry jam, and coffee. Wolfe had of course breakfasted in his room as usual and gone up to the plant rooms on the roof for his morning session with the orchids.

  “It is a good thing, Archie,” Fritz remarked, spooning batter, his own batter, onto the griddle for my fourth cake, “to see you break your fast with proper leisure. Disturbed by no interruptions.”

  I finished a paragraph in the Times on the rack before me, swallowed, sipped some coffee, and spoke. “Fritz, I’ll be honest with you. There’s no one else on earth I could stand in the same room while I’m eating breakfast and reading the morning paper. When you speak you leave it entirely up to me whether I reply, or even whether I listen. However, you should know that I understand you. Take what you just said. What you meant was that no interruptions means no clients and no cases, and you’re wondering if the bank account is getting too low for comfort. Right?”

  “Yes.” He flipped the thick golden-brown disc onto my plate. “But if you think I am worried, no. It is never a question of worry here. With Mr. Wolfe and you—”

  The phone rang. I took it there on the kitchen extension, and a deep baritone voice told me it was Rudolph Hansen and wanted to speak to Nero Wolfe. I said Mr. Wolfe wouldn’t be available until eleven o’clock but I would take a message. He said he had to see him immediately and would be there in fifteen minutes. I said nothing doing before eleven unless he told me why it was so urgent. He said he would arrive in fifteen minutes and hung up.

  Meanwhile Fritz had ditched the cake because it had been off the griddle too long, and started another one.

  Ordinarily when a stranger has made an appointment I do a little research on him in advance, but I wouldn’t have got very far in a quarter of an hour, and anyway I had another cake and cup of coffee coming. I had just finished and gone to the office with the Times to put it on my desk when the doorbell rang. When I went to the hall I saw out on the stoop, through the one-way glass panel in the door, not one stranger but four—three middle-aged men and one who had been, all well dressed and two with homburgs.

  I opened the door the two inches that the chain bolt allowed and spoke through the crack. “Your names, please?”

  “I’m Rudolph Hansen. I telephoned.”

  “And the others?”

  “This is ridiculous! Open the door!”

  “It only seems ridiculous, Mr. Hansen. There are at least a hundred people within a hundred miles, which takes in Sing Sing, who would like to tell Mr. Wolfe what they think of him and maybe prove it. I admit you’re not hoods, but with four of you—names, please?”

  “I’m an attorney-at-law. These are clients of mine. Mr. Oliver Buff. Mr. Patrick O’Garro. Mr. Vernon Assa.”

  The names were certainly no help, but I had had time to size them up, and if I knew anything at all about faces they had come not to make trouble but to get out from under some. So I opened the door, helped them put their hats and coats on the big old walnut rack, ushered them into the office and onto chairs, sat at my desk, and told them:

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but that’s the way it is. Mr. Wolfe never comes to the office until eleven. The rule has been broken, but it takes a lot of breaking. The only way would be for you to tell me all about it and persuade me to tackle him, and then for me to go and tell him all about it and try to persuade him. Even if I succeeded, all that would take twenty-five minutes, and it’s now twenty-five to eleven, so you might as well relax.”

  “Your name’s Goodwin,” Hansen stated. His baritone didn’t sound as deep as it had on the phone. I had awarded him the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk, but, with his long thin neck and gray skin and big ears, he clashed with it. A straight-backed painted job with no upholstery would have suited him better.

  “Mr. Goodwin,” he said, “this is a confidential matter of imperative urgency. I insist that you tell Mr. Wolfe we must see him at once.”

  “We all do,” one of the clients said in an executive tone. Another had popped up from his chair as soon as he sat down and was pacing the floor. The third was trying to keep a match steady enough to light a cigarette. Seeing that I was in for a pointless wrangle, I said politely, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” and got up and left the room.

  In the kitchen, Fritz, who was cleaning up after breakfast and who would never have presumed to ask in words if it looked like business, asked it with a glance as I entered and went to the table where the phones were. I lifted my brows at him, took the house phone, and buzzed the plant rooms.

  In a minute Wolfe growled in my ear. “Well?”

  “I’m calling from the kitchen. In the office are four men with Sulka shirts and Firman shoes in a panic. They say they must see you at once.”

  “Confound it—”

  “Yes, sir. I’m merely notifying you that we have company. I told them I’d see what I can do, and that’s what I can do.” I hung up before he could, took the other phone, and dialed a number.

  Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer Wolfe always calls on when he is driven to that extremity, wasn’t in, but his clerk, Sol Ehrlich, was, and he had heard of Rudolph Hansen. All he knew was that Hansen was a senior partner in one of the big midtown firms with a fat practice, and that he had quite a reputation as a smooth operator. When I hung up I told Fritz that there was a pretty good prospect of snaring a fee that would pay our wages for several months, provided he would finish waking me up by supplying another cup of coffee.

  When the sound came, at eleven o’clock on the dot, of Wolfe’s elevator starting down, I went to the hall, met him as he emerged, reported on Hansen, and followed him into the office. As usual, I waited to pronounce names until he had reached his chair behind his desk, because he doesn’t like to shake hands with strangers, and then Hansen beat me to it. He arose to put a card on Wolfe’s desk and sat down again.

  “My card,” he said. “I’m Rudolph Hansen, attorney-at-law. These gentlemen are clients of mine—that is, their firm is. Mr. Oliver Buff. Mr. Patrick O’Garro. Mr. Vernon Assa. We’ve lost some valuable time waiting for you. We must see you privately.”

  Wolfe was frowning. The first few minutes with prospective clients are always tough for him. Possibly there will be no decent excuse for turning them down, and if not he’ll have to go to work. He shook his head. “This is private. You glance at Mr. Goodwin. He may not be indispensable, but he is irremovable.”

  “We prefer to see you alone.”

  “Then I’m sorry, sir. You have indeed lost time.”

  He looked at his clients, and so did I. Oliver Buff, the one who had finished with middle age, had a round red face that made his hair look whiter, and his hair made his face look redder. He and Hansen wore the homburgs. Patrick O’Garro was brown all over—eyes, hair, suit, tie, shoes, and socks. Of course his shirt was white. The eyes were bright, quick, and clever. Vernon Assa was short and a little plump, with fat shoulders, and either he had just got back from a month in Florida or he hadn’t needed to go. The brown getup would have gone fine with his skin, but he was in gray with black shoes.

  “What the hell,” he muttered.

  “Go ahead,” Buff told Hansen.

  The lawyer returned to Wolfe. “Mr. Goodwin is your employee, of course?”

  “He is.”

  “He is present at this conversation in his capacity as your agent?”

  “Agent? Very well. Yes.”

  “Then that’s understood. First I would like to suggest that you engage me as your counsel and hand me one dollar as a retaining fee.”

  I opened my eyes at him. The guy must be cuckoo. For fee shipments that office was strictly a one-way street.

  “Not an appealing suggestion,” Wolfe said drily. “You have a brief for it?”

  “Certainly. As you know, a conversation between a lawyer and his client is a privileged communication and its disclosure may not be compelled. I wish to establish that confidential relationship with you, lawyer and client, and then tell you of certain circumstances which have led these gentlemen to seek your help. Obviously that will be no protection against voluntary disclosure by you, since you may end the relationship at any moment, but you will be able to refuse a disclosure at the demand of any authority without incurring any penalty. They and I will be at your mercy, but your record and reputation give us complete confidence in your integrity and discretion. I suggest that you retain me for a specific function: to advise you on the desirability of taking a case about to be offered to you by the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa.”

  “What is that firm?”

  “You must have heard of it. The advertising agency.”

  Wolfe’s lips were going left to right and back again. It was his kind of smile. “Very ingenious. I congratulate you. But as you say, you will be at my mercy. I may end the relationship at any moment, with no commitment whatever.”

  “Just a minute,” O’Garro put in, his clever bright brown eyes darting from Wolfe to Hansen. “Must it be like that?”

  “It’s the only way, Pat,” the lawyer told him. “If you hire him, you either trust him or you don’t.”

  “I don’t like it … but if it’s the only way …”

  “It is. Oliver?”

  Buff said yes.

  “Vern?”

  Assa nodded.

  “Then you retain me, Mr. Wolfe? As specified?”

  “Yes.—Archie, give Mr. Hansen a dollar.”

  I got one from my wallet, suppressing a pointed comment which the transaction cert
ainly deserved, crossed to the attorney-at-law, and handed it over.

  “I give you this,” I told him formally, “as the agent for Mr. Nero Wolfe.”

  Chapter 3

  It’s a long story,” Hansen told Wolfe, “but we’ll have to make it as short as possible. These gentlemen have appointments at the District Attorney’s office. I speak as your counsel of matters pertinent to the case to be offered you about which you seek my advice. Have you heard of the murder of Louis Dahlmann?”

  “No.”

  “It was on the radio.”

  “I don’t listen to the radio in the morning. Neither does Mr. Goodwin.”

  “To hell with the radio,” Assa snapped. “Get on, Rudolph.”

  “I am. One of LBA’s big accounts—we call Lippert, Buff and Assa LBA—is Heery Products, Incorporated. One of the Heery products is the line of cosmetics that they call Pour Amour. They introduced it some years ago and it was doing fairly well. Last spring a young man on the LBA staff named Louis Dahlmann conceived an idea for promoting it, and he finally succeeded in getting enough approval of the idea to have it submitted to the Heery people, and they decided they liked it, and it was scheduled to start the twenty-seventh of September. It was a prize contest, the biggest in history, with a first prize of five hundred thousand dollars in cash, second prize two hundred and fifty thousand, third prize one hundred thousand, and fifty-seven smaller prizes. I have to explain it to you. Each week for twenty weeks there appeared in newspapers and magazines a four-line verse, from which—”

  “I can save you that,” Wolfe told him. “I know about it.”

  “Did you enter?” O’Garro demanded.

  “Enter the contest? Good heavens, no.”

  “Get on,” Assa snapped.

  Hansen did so. “The deadline was February fourteenth. The answers had to be postmarked before midnight February fourteenth. There were over two million contestants, and Dahlmann had trained three hundred men and women to handle the checking and recording. When they finished they had seventy-two contestants who had identified all twenty of the women correctly. Dahlmann had more verses ready, and on March twenty-eighth he sent five of them to each of the seventy-two contestants, by airmail to those at a distance, and the answers had to be postmarked before midnight April fourth. It came out a quintuple tie. Five of them correctly identified the five new ones, and Dahlmann telephoned them and arranged for them to come to New York. They would land the first three prizes, the big three, and also two of the ten-thousand-dollar prizes. They came, and last evening he had them to dinner in a private room at the Churchill. Talbott Heery of Heery Products was there, and so were Vernon Assa and Patrick O’Garro. Dahlmann was going to give them five more verses, with a week to solve them, but a woman who lives in Los Angeles objected that she wanted to work at home and would have to take part of the week getting there, so it was arranged to stagger the deadlines for the postmarks according to how long it would take each one to get home. The meeting ended shortly before eleven o’clock, and they left and separated. Four of them, from out of town, had rooms at the Churchill. One who lives in New York, a young woman named Susan Tescher, presumably went home.”

  “Get on, damn it,” Assa snapped.

  “I’m making it as brief as possible, Vern.—Dahlmann also presumably went home. He was a bachelor and lived alone in an apartment on Perry Street. A woman came at seven in the morning to get his breakfast, and when she got there this morning he was on the floor of the living room, dead. He was shot through the heart, from the back, and a cushion from a divan was used to muffle the sound. She ran and got the building superintendent, and the police were notified, and they came and went to work. You may need more facts about the murder when they’re available—he was found only four hours ago—but you may not, because that’s not what you’re needed for. You’re needed for something more urgent than murder.”

  I uncrossed my legs. Something more urgent than murder called for muscles set to go.

  Hansen was leaning forward, his palms on his knees. “Here’s the crux of it. No one knew the answers in that contest but Louis Dahlmann. He had written all the verses himself—the original twenty, the five to break the first tie, with seventy-two contestants, and the five to break the second tie, with five contestants. Of course the answers for the first twenty had to be known to the crew of checkers and recorders, after the deadline had passed and they started to work, but he himself checked the answers of the seventy-two who were in the first tie. With the third group, the five in the second tie, he guarded the verses themselves almost as strictly as the answers. He typed the verses personally and made only seven copies. One copy was placed in a safe deposit vault, one he kept—I’m not sure where—and the other five were given by him last evening to the five contestants at the meeting.”

  “He kept it in his wallet,” O’Garro said.

  Hansen ignored it. “Anyway, the point is not the verses but the answers. I speak of the answers to the last group of five verses—the others don’t matter now. Of course it was merely the names of five women, with an explanation of the fitness of the verses for them. There was supposed to be only one copy in existence. It had been typed by Dahlmann on an LBA letterhead, signed by him and initialed by Buff, O’Garro, and Assa, with the answers covered so they couldn’t see them, and then put in the safe deposit vault, in a sealed envelope, with five men present. So as I said, no one knew the answers but Dahlmann.”

  “As far as we know,” Oliver Buff put in.

  “Certainly,” the lawyer agreed. “To our knowledge.”

  “My God, reach the point,” Assa rapped out.

  “I am. But at the meeting last evening Dahlmann did an extremely reckless thing. When he—”

  “Worse than reckless,” Buff declared. “Irresponsible! Criminal!”

  “That may be a little strong. But it was certainly ill-advised. When he was ready to hand out the new group of verses he took some envelopes from his inside breast pocket, and other things came with them—other papers and his wallet. He passed the envelopes around, and then—you tell it, Pat, you were there.”

  O’Garro obliged. “After he gave them the envelopes he started to return the other stuff to his pocket, then he hesitated a moment, smiled around at them, opened the wallet, took a piece of folded paper from it and held it up, and told them he wanted to make—”

  “No. Exactly what he said.”

  “He said, ‘I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving this here on the table. It’s the names of the women who fit the verses I just gave you.’ Then he slipped the paper back in the wallet and put it in his pocket.”

  “Criminal!” Buff blurted.

  “How soon after that did the meeting end?”

  “Almost immediately. They were so anxious to take a look at the verses we couldn’t have held them if we had wanted to, and we didn’t.”

  Hansen leaned to Wolfe. “There it is. When Dahlmann’s body was found he was fully dressed, in the same clothes. Everything was in his pockets, including a roll of bills, several hundred dollars, except one thing. The wallet was gone. We want—Lippert, Buff and Assa want you to find out which one of those five people took it, and today if possible. They’re in New York. Four of them were going to take planes this morning, but we stopped them by telling them that the police will have to see them.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “We have appointments at the District Attorney’s office, but they can wait. What do you need to get started fast?”

  “Quite a little.” Wolfe sighed. “Am I being engaged by the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa? Is that correct?”

  Hansen turned his head. “Oliver?”

  “Yes,” Buff said, “that’s correct.”

  “I charge extravagantly. The amount of the fee is left open?”

  “Yes.”

  “To hell with the fee,” Assa said, a noble attitude.

  “Where,” Wolfe asked, “is Mr. Lippert?”

  “There is no Lippert. He died ten years ago.”

  “Then he’s through with perfume contests.—You said, Mr. Hansen, that you want me to find out which of those five people took the wallet. I won’t undertake it. It’s too restricted. What if none of them did?”